One government agency is attempting to re-invent computing. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - or DARPA - has started the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program to create a revolutionary new generation of computing systems they hope will overcome limits to the way computers are evolving now.

Increasing the performance of computers has been driven by - what's been dubbed - Moore's Law, the doubling of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit every two years. But, gains in performance will be limited by significantly greater power consumption, and programming complexity issues. The DARPA program will work to develop radically new computer architectures and programming models that are 100 to 1,000 times more energy efficient. The program directly addresses major priorities expressed by the President's "Strategy for American Innovation".